About Darwin
Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809 in Shrewsbury, Shropshire England to Robert and Susannah Darwin. He was the 5th of 6 children. By the time he was 8 years old, he had already begun the study of Natural History. His parents were not strict followers of the Anglican Church and for a time Darwin attended the local Unitarian chapel with his mother.
Darwin’s career plans as a young man changed frequently. He initially set out to become a medical doctor like his father, and then attended Cambridge University in pursuit of a career as a minister. All the while Darwin was an intent student of Natural History.
Perhaps the most significant event to push Darwin away from the ministry was his posting on the HMS Beagle as the ship’s naturalist. Darwin traveled around the world on the Beagle between 1831 and 1836. He studied anything and everything he could set eyes on while with the Beagle and collected a huge variety of specimens to bring back with him to England.
Between 1836 and 1859, when Darwin published the first edition of his seminal work “On the Origin of Species” Darwin immersed himself in studying variation among organisms. He was a prolific author publishing on all sorts of topics in the realm of Biology and Geology. (The complete works of Darwin can now be found online at http://darwin-online.org.uk/).
In 1859 the first editon of Darwin’s masterwork, “On the origin of species” was published. The book was to eventually see 6 editions, the last published in 1872. Darwin was able therefore to refine his ideas and respond to criticism in latter editions of the text. This most famous work is where Darwin argued that evolution takes place by natural selection, also called “Survival of the Fittest.”
Darwin also married and had a family of 10 children. He died at age 73 in 1882.
Remarkably, Darwin had no knowledge of Genetics or the mechanisms of inheritance as he developed his ideas. His idea of natural selection lost favor in the early 1900’s as Biologists began to understand that mutations could lead to variation and thus, it was suspected at the time, were far more important than selection in causing organic evolution. However, in the 1920’s – 1940’s work by geneticists, mathematicians, paleontologists, anatomists and developmental biologists was synthisized and that synthesis confirmed that Natural Selection is indeed a very powerful force of evolution.